I’ve been limping along this week with intense upper back pain, so I’ve had more forced downtime than usual. It’s inadvertently given me a lot of time to think.

I actually suspect that some of this may actually be delayed fallout of my dad’s sudden passing. Since that happened, I had to shift into “helper” mode for my mom. It was like I just shelved any of my emotions and pushed through a lot of physical aches because someone else was depending on me.

It wasn’t like right after Mario passed when I started immediately having very odd, physical pains that I’d never had before. I didn’t have as much of an immediate distraction. That was when I discovered that grief can absolutely manifest as physical pain.

So as I’ve been trying to manage this new physical pain is various ways (I don’t do well with pain meds), spending a lot of time trying to focus on deep breathing and that sort of thing, the concept of letting go kept drifting through my mind.

When it comes to losing a spouse, there’s multiple levels of letting go. There is that physical and literal level of letting the person go into the great unknown. There is the other literal level of letting go of their possessions. But then I started to think of what things I emotionally let go of when Mario passed away.

Looking back, I realized the very first things I emotionally let go of were all those little things he used to do that drove me crazy! I don’t care who you are or what you say, every couple has those types of things. And it goes both ways too, for all the things he did that got to me, there were things I did that got to him. But at the end of the day, we’d work through whatever it was. That’s just part of life and being in a relationship with another human. No one is perfect.

I distinctly remember standing in the kitchen the day after he was gone. Instead of setting a dirty dish in the sink, I put it right in the dishwasher and at the same time, I kind of forgave Mario for every dirty dish he put in that sink (usually right after I’d just cleaned the sink).

I didn’t really clue in at the time, probably because I was an emotional wreck, but what I was doing was very much letting go of negative emotions I associated with that particular thing he did. As the days went on, everything he and I experienced that caused a small spat, a momentary annoyance, or even an actual argument (which I admit, was rare), kind of dissolved, for lack of a better word.

And I’ll admit, there was a sadness to it, because I also knew that most of those things that were part of regular, everyday life, would never happen again. From here on out, if a dish was in the sink, I put it there.

And while I say those things “dissolved”, it’s not like I have forgotten them all, but they don’t have the emotional weight they once did. Where the emotional weight remains is all the important moments, the good times and the times we held each other up when going through something.

Now if I could just let go of this back pain…